


BIGFOOT MUSEUM 10 MI

by ArtemisTheHuntress



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, I love these sad siblings so much... bless, Post-999, ZEcret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-13 20:12:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12991659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtemisTheHuntress/pseuds/ArtemisTheHuntress
Summary: Akane has been through hell and back, and it's been a rough nine hours... and a rough nine years.Sometimes, after the end of a harrowing and exhausting period of one's life, and before the start of an even more harrowing and exhausting one she knows is coming soon, a girl just wants to take a break sometimes.And by "take a break" she means "visit a shitty Bigfoot museum in the Pacific Northwest."





	BIGFOOT MUSEUM 10 MI

**Author's Note:**

  * For [satelliteinasupernova](https://archiveofourown.org/users/satelliteinasupernova/gifts).



> ... who requested "Akane and Aoi finding a small moment in the middle of everything to just be carefree." I hope you like it.

The jeep tore up the red-rock scrub as they barrelled across the Mojave. (It wasn’t _really_ the Mojave Desert, Akane had informed him, before they’d flown out here; Building Q was farther north, nearer to… well, nearer to nothing, really, that was the point; there was nothing but bare rock and scruffy shrubs for miles and miles.)

Aoi, behind the wheel of their mostly legally acquired ATV, had decided to leave the road an hour ago. “They’ll be fumbling their way out of the building any minute now,” he’d said. “Would be kinda fucked if they caught up with us at this point.”

“Mmhm!” Akane said, brightly, not really listening to him. She was riding in the passenger seat with the window rolled all the way down, her head tilted back, eyes closed, the wind from their solid 130 kph down the empty desert road whipping her hair around her face.

Even now, Aoi couldn’t help checking Akane with sidelong glances every few seconds, to reassure himself that she was _real_ , that this was finally really happening. They’d been working towards this day for nine years, but for Aoi, it had only ever been Akane’s insistence, Akane’s plans, Akane’s memories of the future he’d relied on; and she was always _right_ , but. It had still felt fake, on some level, still felt like Akane was chasing ghosts, and he had no choice but to trust the things that only she could see.

But it _was_ real, and what’s more, they’d pulled it off with barely a single hitch, and if _that_ wasn’t something like a miracle, Aoi didn’t know what was.

(Well. Akane had told him that was how it would work - “How it has to,” she’d said, months ago, poring over a dense quantum physics journal late at night at the kitchen table of the unobtrusive apartment outside of Tokyo they’d been staying in that year. “The failstates will collapse – paradoxes at that level will be unsustainable. There will be… there will be a lot of timelines where we fail. But they won’t matter, because the one where we survive will be the one where we succeed. We won’t even have to remember the failures.” _You will, though,_ Aoi wanted to say, but she looked so… not even tired, though she was, but _intense,_ serious and sharp and driven past any personal regard for health or comfort, that he didn’t want to dredge up an argument. So he’d just said, “Lucky us, then, huh,” and got a bag of chips from the cabinet above the sink because he needed some excuse to stay in the room but let Akane continue her meticulous research.)

Dark apartments and brain-melting physics papers felt a world away now, though. And that Akane was, too, which was the strangest part. She was staring out the window, eyes bright, hair still whipping in her face but she didn’t _mind_ , even though normally she kept it so carefully pulled back. The car crashed over a low ridge and an animal like a deer startled at the movement. It pranced away, almost snootily; and Akane _laughed_ , delighted, her face lit up in the joy of moving fast and being in the sunshine and being _alive_ , in a way Aoi hadn’t seen in her since… well, since she was twelve.

* * *

 

Twilight was falling as they rumbled through Oregon. They’d left the desert behind for grasses, and then trees, and then temperate rainforests; people were still sparse, here, and they took pains to keep it that way, but the foliage was thick. The setting sun cast the early autumn trees in a nearly golden glow; summer wasn’t over yet, here, and even at sunset the air was warm and the treetops warbled with birdsong.

Akane closed her eyes and let herself breathe it all in. The smell of pines, the end-of-summer flowers, fresh air, warm sunlight, the sound of the breeze in the needles and the feel of it on her skin. Nine years of being a paradox, partially dead, a constant reminder of fire in the back of her brain and a tingle in her nerves when she felt time split - she’d forgotten what it felt like to be alive. The world seemed brighter, the colors more vibrant, the air swirling with smells she’d either forgotten or been too busy (too focused, too distracted, too traumatized) to notice.

_Alive_ , and untethered to weird twists of fate anymore. It felt good to have the last slice of personal autonomy for her future back. She’d missed that, more than anything.

“Think we should stop?” Aoi asked. “How far is it left to the border?”

Akane checked her phone. “Another five hundred miles. Nine hours left to drive.”

Aoi let out a frustrated sigh through his teeth. _”Fuck._ Why is America so _big?_ ”

“Aliens,” Akane said.

“Thanks.”

“We might as well stop to get something to eat, at least,” Akane said. “There’s no point in driving all the way through tonight. Junpei and Light and Clover and the others will have been found by _someone_ , by now. And whatever explanation they give, it’ll take a while to untangle the truth. No one should be after us yet, I don’t think, and no one knows where we’re going.” She rested her chin on her elbow, pensive now, and watched the shadows from the trees streak by. “They all have their passports, but the moment they try to leave – if they haven’t gone to the police already – it will be obvious they’re not in the country legally. That won’t be very good for any of them.”

“Unless you wanted to leave a signed confession in the glove compartment with them, I don’t know what else we’d do.” The road was twisting and turning through thick trees now, and Aoi had to pay most of his attention to it.

“Mm.” Akane sat back up and turned her attention to her phone. The headiness of being alive and free again was starting to have to take a backseat to the new set of concerns that faced them. “I wish there’d been more time to set up a stronger Crash Keys base in America –” _Though that would have meant more years of waiting around, half-dead,_ beholden, _planning but unable to effect those plans, aware of the timelines passing and branching but unable to_ do _anything about it, and now that I’m free of it I know I would hate having to bear that for another minute_ – “but can we use what we have to move those six through the process of getting back home more easily? I’m not sure we have any operatives in positions that would help much, but I don’t want to leave them stranded here. Maybe we could – wait. Nii-chan. _Nii-chan._ Look at that.”

Aoi turned his head. “What – ?” and then saw what Akane was looking at. “You can’t be serious.”

They were moving slowly enough down this twisty road to both clearly read the brown sign standing almost desperately on the side: BIGFOOT MUSEUM 10 MI.

Akane pulled a dramatically sad face. “Oh, nii-chan, I’ve been to America so many times, and I haven’t even seen Bigfoot _once_. You won’t deny me this chance, would you?”

“Do you actually want to go see it?” Aoi asked. “Admit it, Akane, it looks like the fakest thing in the world. You’ll be the most supernatural thing there.”

She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “That’s part of the _fun._ Besides, how can you know it’s fake until you see all the evidence, huh?”

Aoi rolled his eyes, but couldn’t help but grin, just a little bit. “Well, maybe they’ll have Bigfoot burgers or something. Make the stop worthwhile.”

“That’s the spirit!”

* * *

 

The Bigfoot Museum was, in fact, the fakest thing Aoi had ever seen. It was the central attraction on the “main street” of a small town that was mostly woods, and it had a fifteen-foot-tall fiberglass statue of a hairy ape-man right outside the door so no one could possibly miss it. A mock-log cabin on the outside, what looked like a renovated office inside, and practically half gift shop, it was about as kitschy as he expected.

(Akane loved it as much as he’d expected, though, so he could hardly begrudge it _too_ much.)

For ten dollars each, a single tour guide in a knockoff park ranger’s hat led them through the few rooms, telling tales of drama and danger, and breathless escapes from strange beasts in the woods. Here were photos from a logging camp in 1911, she said, gesturing at grainy sepia things blown up to poster size on the wall! And the men who took these pictures – they _swore to the end of their days that their saws and drills were destroyed by a shaggy, lumpy man-beast who roared at them to leave his woods!_ (“Since when can Bigfoot talk?” Aoi asked Akane, and Akane nodded sagely. “There must be many varieties of Bigfoot roaming the forests of Cascadia. Several species in the same genus, you know.” “Naturally.”)

The tour guide, a mid-twenties woman with a plastic nametag (Sophia, apparently), was _way_ too into this. Here, in a glass case on a pedestal, was a fragment of hair shot off Bigfoot by a hunter in 1972! See how thick and lustrous it is; scientists were not able to identify it as a bear, or a moose, or a wolf, or anything else! Or here – a life-size diorama of a Pacific Northwest scene, with Bigfoot front and center, and an awed and cowering logging crew running away! Or here – press a button to listen to the firsthand accounts of some of these brave wilderness explorers who saw Bigfoot with their own eyes! (Or here, some serious information about the Cascadia bioregion, local species, the diverse but fragile ecosystem, and how YOU can help support conservation efforts and protect local wildlife! Including Bigfoot!)

Akane took it all in with the gravitas of a visiting professor conversing with another expert in her field. She asked questions – “How often has Bigfoot been known to talk to people?” “Has anyone posited a cladistic relationship between Bigfoot and the Tibetan Yeti?” “Where were these clawmarks found? They look so deep!” They weren’t _gotcha_ type questions, and they weren’t mean-spirited. Sophia seemed thrilled to answer them. Akane was having fun, allowing herself to have fun, and, well, this was the weird shit she’d always liked.

“Have you ever seen Bigfoot?” Akane asked her. “Is he around here?”

“I wish,” Sophia said. “And, honestly, who even knows if he’s real?”

“What?” Aoi said. “Seriously? You’ve been giving us the grand tour and you don’t even believe in Bigfoot?”

“I don’t _not_ believe in Bigfoot,” Sophia said, sounding almost hurt. “But that’s part of the fun. The mystery. If everyone knew for a fact that Bigfoot was real, this museum would be kinda boring. You don’t see many brown bear museums, you know? You have to have _something_ out there to look for, or else what’s the point?”

That… okay. Whatever. Aoi shrugged, but Akane looked thoughtful, and then asked how many visitors who came through claimed to have seen Bigfoot.

* * *

 

There _was_ an associated cafe around the back, and they did sell Bigfoot Burgers.

“Fucking morphogentic fields,” Aoi said, through bites of _extremely_ mediocre and very greasy meat and cheese and bread.

Akane twirled a Bigfoot keychain around her finger idly. She’d bought it at the gift shop, because, in her own words, “Why not?”

Night had fallen, now, and the Bigfoot Museum was closing at eight. Akane was staring off into the woods only a dozen meters away, that swallowed the yellow light from the museum and the streetlights in pitch darkness.

“Looking for Bigfoot?” Aoi asked.

“Just thinking,” Akane said. Then, after a pause, “Is this what being alive feels like?”

“Donno,” Aoi said. “You tell me.”

“It’s definitely different.” She wasn’t sure how to explain it. But it _was_ different, from how she’d been the past nine years. Like something had lifted, and she could see more clearly. And could feel more clearly the creeping dread of the _something_ she’d been trying to figure out for the past nine years, something she’d gotten jumbled flashes of that day in the incinerator, something that this time around, more pieces fell into place. They were still elusive, still jumbled, but the feeling was clear. Emotions passed over the fields more easily than information, Akane had found, through her reading, and her own experimentation. She could pull information now, of course, pull memories from other timelines and other lives as easily as she could from her own past, but there was something else lurking in her mind she couldn’t quite catch all the information for. But it was big, and it was coming soon, and she had a few threads of leads that she knew they would have to start following as soon as possible. (A face crystallized in her mind, this time around, a name: _Sigma Klim_. She would _absolutely_ be following up on this.)

Aoi looked over at her, strangely. Did he know? Probably not; he had never accessed the future, the way she had. But she was sure he knew, as well as she did, that there was still a lot of trial and hardship ahead of them. They couldn’t have built the Crash Keys the way they did without being able to impress on them that they wouldn’t just be saving Akane’s life, they would be saving the world.

But that’s not just yet. She’s finally free. They can spare one day to be carefree.

She smiled. “I’ve missed this.”

He smiled back, hesitantly. Then, “We should probably get going. The six of them will definitely have run into someone who’s realized that they shouldn’t be here.”

“That’s true,” Akane said. She stood up and stretched. “We won’t make it to Canada tonight. Ikeda knows to have the jet there tomorrow, in any case. We can drive until we find a motel, or a campsite. Sleep in the car, if we have to.”

“I’d prefer a motel, if it’s all the same to you,” Aoi said. “I do _not_ want to wake up and drive another ten hours after sleeping in a car.”

“Very fair.” She waved goodbye to Sophia, who was closing up the museum, then headed over to the gravel driveway where the car was parked. “Want me to drive this time?”

Aoi swung into the passenger seat. “Go right ahead.”

Akane tossed her hair and straightened her back. She did want to get at least another two or three hours of driving in before stopping for the night.

She noticed Aoi watching her, a strange expression on his face. “Hmm?”

“Just – nothing,” he said. Then, “I’ve missed you, Akane.”

She smiled, determinedly, almost sadly, as she revved up the car and pulled back onto the road. “I’ve missed me, too.”


End file.
